Good Pain
by Zamael
Summary: Perhaps punching those ironwood trees for so long had not been such a great idea after all. But how could she have known it back then?


It was a windy evening when Tigress sat at the Sacred Pool of Tears, meditating, feeling the wind blow against her face and bare chest, her tail, her feet... but not her arms. When she cupped some water on her paw and used it to wash her face, only throughout the second half of the process did her body actually register the cold and wet feeling, as it splashed against her, leaving her hands.

She had been up here for hours, not entirely sure what she was doing. Mostly she was just trying to feel. Many had been the great masters, over the many centuries in the history of kung fu, who had numbed themselves from pain, let their hands be free from weakness, allowing them to punch through stone and steel without feeling a thing.

But before her, how many had ever tried to _reverse_ the process?

Tigress had been just a little girl when she threw the first punch, the beginning of a long, painful, taxing work with the ironwood trees behind the palace. Disappointed of her lack of progress with Master Shifu, wishing so hard to surpass his last student and make him proud, thinking Master Oogway was a dumb old turtle who didn't know anything, and even, perhaps just a little bit, considering boys icky and holding hands with them a waste of time. Of course it hurt, but she could stand a little pain: besides that, there seemed to be no drawback at all in the deal, the best of both worlds.

The sad child grew up some and became an angry teen, one lashing out at the world and thinking no one understood her. Thinking her elders were out of touch with reality, taking her master's scolding and criticism as personal offense, she would often find herself with the trees, and striking them harder than she had ever before. Other girls of her age would run away from home, decorate their rooms in a way their parents disapproved of, or date bad boys several year (even decades) of their senior, but not Tigress: she just vented her anger to the impassive, immovable ironwood.

As an adult, Tigress was stoic, goal-oriented, driven. Still punching trees, cracking her bones, feeling it less and less every year, she had picked up another goal as well, almost without making conscious notice of it at all: out of the phase she had lived in for a year or two, she had begun working on her emotions as well, becoming as unfeeling and powerful as her paws were soon going to be. She rarely felt anger, or disappointment, and considered any sort of romantic attachment a distraction, something leading her away from her road to strength and wisdom. A true kung fu master will not be distracted by her emotions, any more than her pain.

And then, just when she thought she had succeeded, just when all pain, all emotion, had been purged from her, just when she was going to receive the Dragon Scroll, just when it was all going to be worth it... a big, fat, stupid distraction had fallen from the heavens and landed right in front of her.

And suddenly she was feeling once again. She felt disappointment and anger of being rejected, tossed aside in favour of this imbecile. Sympathy for Master Shifu, for having to deal with him and being stuck with him as the true Dragon Warrior. Humiliation for being defeated by Tai Lung, paralyzed, left alive to act as a message of terror. Humility for finding herself to be wrong about the panda after all, and accepting him as a true master.

Pain unlike anything else in her entire life, when she briefly thought he had perished. Like all other emotion had been purged from her, leaving only soul-crushing emptiness. Dead inside.

Minutes later, she found herself floating in the harbor, a piece of wood to help herself keep aloft. The cannon blast had brought with it the single worst instance of physical pain in her life, to complement the mental anguish she had felt just before: it had struck her chest, despite her attempts of blocking it with her unfeeling hands. Even now in the present, weeks after the fact, it stung a little.

Po just had to be a caring, sensitive guy, and hold her hand to see if she was all right. It was, to her memory, the first time in the last two decades she had actually _wanted_ to feel something, would have embraced the touch... and was denied it. She had felt nothing. That was the insult to injury, the little thing that made this all unbearable. When he swam away, she reached after him, as if thinking that another attempt might have better results, let her feel him.

He thought she did not feel anything, but in spite of how much she might have sometimes thought it to be true, it was just blatantly wrong. She _did_ feel: most of the time it had been a negative thing, something she might have wanted to get rid of, but now, for the first time in her life, she wished to feel _more_. It still hurt somewhere deep in her chest, but this was not the scar given to her by the cannon. Like her bones breaking years ago as she punched her hands against the ironwood trees, this was _good_ pain. It motivated her.

Tigress felt longing.

She was not particularly bothered by this. Where others might have been afraid to ever bring it up with their prospective significant others, despairing that the other one would never like them, she was more than ready to let Po know. But she was not going to do it until she was ready, until she could feel his hand in hers.

It was getting cold at the Sacred Pool of Tears. Winter was coming. Tigress merely took a deep breath, assumed the position, and meditated the cold around her body, and her heart.


End file.
